Category Archives: Computers

More demand for PHP Developers?

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It’s interesting that it appears there are more jobs for Freelance PHP developers in Cape Town than there are for Freelance C# developers.

I’m surprised by this because I assumed (incorrectly it appears) that there would be more PHP developers out there as its been around a long time and its “free” and most coders have used it at one time or another. Obviously though finding a “good” PHP developer is probably as hard as finding a good C# developer, perhaps even harder given there are so many out there, there may be more “bad” ones.

Maybe I should spend more time sharpening my PHP skills than my C# skills?

What happens when the framework vanishes?

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This is a response/comment to Richard’s blog entry about 3 Things to Learn from LINQ to SQL

How many times have you done work based on a particular technology only to have it vanish or be completely incompatible in the next release?

You don’t want to know how many “legacy” apps I have to support that only work in 2003 and .NET 1.1 because the library or two I used is no longer available or is completely in compatible. Continue reading →

Owl Says Woot?

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So this is a shout out post to some friends of mine…

Richard (a friend in the UK at the moment) left a post on this site with a link to a website… I was curious, clicked it and suddenly found their (Richard & Rachel)? rather cool website about programming and stuff. I’m a sucker for reading coding blogs…

Owl Says Woot

PS: Cool name too….

Steve Jobs on managing through the Economic Downturn.

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I found this quote on Fortune’s Magazine’s website through a mention on this blog.

“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”

What’s interesting is that this may actually be what put Apple so far ahead of there competition after the .com bomb. Obviously not all companies have the huge cash reserves Apple does, but it does show that they’re looking towards the future and have a plan, a rather good plan. It means that as the economy picks up, we’ll probably see plenty of new exciting products from Apple.

Although of course the big question on all the Apple rumour sites is, will Steve still be with us? I really do hope so.

Writing WordPress Plugins

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I’m currently working on a little side project that involves doing lots of customisations to WordPress. (What exactly I’m up too will have to remain a secret for the moment, sorry customers orders.) I’ve been working today on writing a new plugin for WordPress that will turn it into what I need for my client, once the plugin has reached a use-able state I’ll start with the theme.

My development environment currently consists of WordPress 2.7 running on XAMPP for Windows (MySQL + Apache + PHP) with NetBeans 6.5 with PHP support. Netbeans works great as a PHP editor and its also a good Java IDE (although I’m not using it as that at the moment for this project.).

My biggest problem has been dusting off my PHP knowledge and trying to puzzle out the WordPress plugin API. There is alot of info on writing WordPress plugins on the WordPress Codex another useful link is this one on how to configure Netbeans for wordpress plugin development, I suggest you check out on the same page the info about creating a wordpress project and importing the source so you can have all the auto-completion goodness. The only thing I haven’t gotten working yet is XDebug so I can’t debug the PHP code or step through it in Netbeans, not sure why its not working but touch wood I haven’t needed it yet.

Open Source ERP

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Anyone have any experience (good or bad) of implementing a Free/Open source ERP system? Which one did you choose? How did you do it? What was the final outcome?

By day I work for a company that sells and implements Syspro a commercial ERP system developed in South Africa. I work as a programmer/developer writing add-ons/mods/reports and applications that integrate with Syspro.

But I’m interested in finding out from people who’ve actually attempted implementing one of the Open Source ERP systems how it went and what problems they ran into. I’m curious to see if the Open Source model actually works from a clients point of view for ERP applications. I’m particularly interested if you implemented the product with out working with a partner company or a 3rd party doing the majority of the work yourself.

A quick search in Google brings up a rather long list of Open Source ERP systems and frameworks for building ERP systems and there are plenty of “white papers” about the implementation processes but they feel sanitized. I’m looking for real world accounts from the people who were in the trenches.?

In particular if you have any experience with the following ones (but any of the others will help):
Compiere
OpenBravo
OpenTaps
OpenERP (Used to be TinyERP)
Xtuple (PostBooks/Standard/Open Manufacturing)

Did you implement the standard system straight from the site? Or did you actually take advantage of the “Openness” and customise the application to your business?

The worlds a Twitter…

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twitter_logoI’ve finally given in and gotten a twitter account (dale_nunns). I’m not entirely sure how it all works or what I’m supposed to do with it, but it sounded cool, looked cool and is something new to play with.?The final push came from a friend who we share offices with, he was showing me a cool new website design he’s working on that has Twitter integrated into it and was telling me about the communities that Twitter helps build and generally evangelising it a lot, so I thought I might as well give it a try.

So you’ll notice that there is now a “Dale On Twitter” section on the widget bar to the right of this site that’ll show my latest “tweets”, I’m not sure how well its going to work or how long I’ll keep “tweeting”, but I’ll give it a try.

Twitter is a sort of cross between?between IM (Instant Messaging) and perhaps Facebook’s “Status” field with some added web 2.0 social networking stirred in for good measure, its nothing particularly fancy. But you can “tweet” from cell phones, PDA’s and other devices. Tweets are limited to 140chars so you can’t type your new epistle which is probably a good thing.

I love this one comment on their about page “…?While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”, in answer to the question “How do you make money from twitter?”. I have to agree that really is an odd business model.

In case you’re wondering what a tweet is, I’m not entirely sure if I’ve got the terminology correct… but as I understand it one message that you’ve sent out via Twitter.

Ruby On Rails and a Woolies Queue

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I’ve been spending some of my copious free time learning something new, Ruby On Rails. Before everyone gets excited and says “Oh no not another blog about RoR and how wonderful it is…” this is not one of those kinds of posts, in fact its got nothing to do with RoR actually.?

Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot about RoR and trying various things out with it to see what can be done, how easy it is and is it actually something that I should try learn. I’ve got a few crazy ideas for some “web-enabled” applications and am looking for an easy way to rapidly develop the applications.

Continue reading →

Invalid Last Name

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After Tuesday’s new MacBook announcement, I desperately wanted to find out when the new MacBook’s would be available in South Africa. I went to the official SA distributors website (http://www.core.co.za) and rummaged around trying to some kind of “contact us” email address. I finally decided, after not finding any other electronic contact method to use the feedback form. I filled in my details, wrote up a nice little message asking when the new MacBooks would be available and then clicked the “Submit” button and thats when the error message pop’d up. “Please Enter a valid lastname. A minimum of 6 characters are required” obviously this shook my world as I was suddenly being told that my lastname which I’ve had for 20something years is invalid… after some deep soul searching I decided I would change it to “Nunns.” and the feedback page accepted it. I do feel sorry for those people who’s names won’t be made valid by simply adding a character